I’ve been re-reading Geoff Dyer ’s book ‘But Beautiful’ recently – it was published in 1991 – which is a book about Jazz, and is a must for any devotee of the music, and a small literary masterpiece that can – must – be read and re-read. It is one writer’s take on the life of jazz musicians. Let me quote from his piece on Lester Young:

“When he woke the room was filled with the green haze of a neon sign outside that had blinked to life while he slept. He slept so lightly it hardly even merited the name of sleep, just a change in the pace of things, everything floating away from everything else. When he was awake he sometimes wondered if he was just dozing, dreaming he was there, dying in a hotel room.

“His horn lay next to him on the bed. On a bedside cabinet were a picture of his parents, bottles of cologne and his porkpie hat. He’d seen a photograph of Victorian girls wearing hats like that, ribbons hanging down. Nice, pretty, he thought, and had worn one ever since”

This is writing of a high order and you can almost hear Lester’s haunting, breathy, elongated playing in the background. In those two paragraphs you get a real feel of the man, his intelligence and style, his sadness, his laid back acceptance of the dreadful things that life had thrown at him, especially the horrors of racial abuse when serving in the American Army in World War II, and his desire, through drink and pills, to put those memories behind him – which he couldn’t. All of that is in his music, and in Dyer’s writing.

But Beautiful also takes a look at Duke Ellington on the road, and his relationship with Harry Carney, his baritone sax player and driver.